CHILDISH MISDEMEANORS

by Gottfried Keller

I never did much talking, however, but I took care that nothing of what was happening should escape my eyes and ears. Then laden with all these impressions I would cross the road and go back home where, in the quiet stillness of our sitting-room, I wove them into a vast dream-fabric, my excited imagination setting the pattern. These dreams were so interwoven with my real life that I could hardly distinguish the one from the other.

Only thus can I explain to myself, among other things, an incident that took place when I was about seven years old and which I cannot otherwise understand at all. I was sitting one day at the table, busy with some toy or other, and I said to myself some unseemly and extremely coarse words of whose meaning I was ignorant, and which I had perhaps heard in the street. A woman was sitting beside my mother, talking to her, when she heard these words and drew my mother’s attention to them. Then they asked me with an air of gravity who had been teaching me things like that, and the strange woman in particular urged me to tell, whereupon I was surprised, reflected for a moment, and then said the name of a boy whom I used to see in school. I added immediately two or three other names, all boys of twelve and thirteen, with whom I had scarcely ever exchanged a word. A few days later, to my astonishment, the teacher kept me back after school together with these four boys already mentioned, who seemed to me almost men, they were so far ahead of me in age and growth. A clergyman appeared, one who usually gave us religious instruction and besides that superintended the school; he sat down at the table with the teacher and bade me sit next to him. The boys on the other hand had to stand in a row in front of the table and await events. They were now asked, in a solemn voice, whether they had spoken certain words in my presence; they did not know what to answer and were utterly astounded. Upon this the revered gentleman said to me: ‘Where was it that you heard the boys say these things?’ I was off again at once, answering without delay and with dry precision: ‘In Brüderlein Wood!’ This is a wood a mile away from the town, where I had never been in my life, but I had often heard it spoken of. ‘How did it happen? How did you all get there?’ was the next question. I told them how the boys had persuaded me one day to go for a walk, and had taken me out into the wood with them, and I described in detail the manner in which bigger boys will sometimes take a smaller boy with them on a mischievous expedition. The accused boys were beside themselves, and protested with tears that they had not been in the wood, some not for a long time, some never at all, certainly not ever with me! And at that they gazed on me with alarm and detestation, as upon a poisonous serpent, and were ready to assail me with reproaches and questions, but they were commanded to be silent, and I was required to state by what path we had gone. Immediately this path lay plain before my eyes, and inflamed by contradiction and by the denial of a romance in which I now firmly believed myself, for in no other wise could I explain to myself how this situation had come about, I described every stick and stone of the way that led to the place. I knew it only by the merest hearsay and although I had hardly paid any attention to what I heard, every word now came to me in the nick of time. Furthermore, I told how on the way we had beaten down nuts from the trees, kindled a fire, roasted stolen potatoes, also how lamentably we had cudgeled a young peasant lad who would have stopped us. On arrival in the wood my companions had climbed the tall fir-trees, and aloft they had shouted for joy, calling the minister and the schoolmaster by nicknames. These nicknames I myself, meditating upon the physical appearance of the two men, had long since devised in my own heart, but never divulged; on this occasion I brought them both out simultaneously, and the wrath of the gentlemen was as great as the amazement of the boys whom I was using as a screen for myself. After they had climbed down from the trees, they had cut great switches and then commanded me to climb a small tree in like manner, and from the top of it to call out the nicknames. When I refused, they had bound me fast to a tree and beaten me with the switches until I said aloud everything that they demanded, including those indecent expressions. While I was calling them out, the boys stole away behind my back; a peasant came up at the same moment, heard my unseemly speech, and seized me by the ears. ‘Wait, you bad boys!’ he had cried, ‘I’ve got this one!’ and cuffed me soundly. Then he too went away and left me standing there, and meanwhile it was already growing dark. With much difficulty I had torn myself free and tried in the dark wood to find my way home. But I went astray, fell into a deep stream where I alternately swam and waded, as far as the end of the wood, and so, after passing through many dangers, found the right path. But besides all this, I had been attacked by a great he-goat which I had fought and routed with a hedge-stake, torn quickly from the fence.

Never before had they known me in school to be so eloquent as I was in this narrative. It never occurred to anybody to make enquiries of my mother, whether there had been a day when I returned home wet through and very late in the evening. On the contrary, they connected my adventure with the fact that one or another of the boys had been proved to have played truant from school just at the time that I specified. They trusted my extreme youth as well as the tale which fell, quite unexpectedly and ingenuously, down out of the blue sky of my usual silence.

The innocent accused were condemned as unruly, vicious young folk, for their stubborn and unanimous denial, and their righteous indignation and despair made matters still worse; they received the most severe of school punishments, were placed upon the bench for those in disgrace, and besides this were beaten by their parents and locked up.

So far as I can dimly remember, the mischief I had caused was to me not only a matter of indifference, but I even felt within myself a sense of gratification that poetic justice had rounded off my invention so beautifully that something striking had occurred, been dealt with, and endured, and this in consequence of my creative word. I could not at all comprehend why the ill-treated youngsters complained so nor how they could be so incensed against me, since the admirable progress of the affair was a matter of course, and I could as little alter anything in it as the old gods could change Destiny.

The persons concerned were all of the kind who even in the world of childhood can be called upright folk, quiet, steady boys who up to that time had never merited sharp reproof, and who have since grown into quiet, industrious young citizens. For this reason the recollection of my devilment and of the injustice they had suffered took root all the more deeply in them, and when they reproached me with it, long years afterwards, I was able to call to mind exact details of the forgotten story, and almost every word of it lived again for me. Now for the first time the incident tormented me with a doubled and persistent fury; as often as I thought of it, the blood rushed to my head, and with all my might I tried to put the blame on those very credulous inquisitors, or even on the gossiping woman who had noticed the forbidden words and not rested until some definite origin had been assigned to them. Three of my former school companions forgave me and laughed when they saw how the matter worried me in retrospect, and they were delighted that I could remember every detail so well, to their satisfaction. Only the fourth, for whom life had been difficult, could never distinguish between the days of childhood and those of a riper age, and he bore me as deep a grudge for the injury he had suffered as if I had perpetrated it only today and in the light of a mature understanding. He would pass me by with the deepest hatred, and when he threw insulting glances my way, I could answer nothing, because the original injustice was on my side, and no one could forget that.

(courtesy of Michael Lipkin)